Hi,in order to play the latest humblebundle games (check 'em out, looks promising, especially Brütal Legend) I have to turn my Mint 14 kde 64bit system multiarch, because the installers and games are 32 bit binaries. If I remember correctly, in order to do so I have to install the 32bit shared libs. So I tried to install ia32-libs via synaptic, but it tells me it has to uninstall kde-workspace. kde-workspace-bin and plasma-desktop, which of course would break my system. I'm using the latest kde version installed by enabling the backports und doing a dist upgrade.

Any idea how to prevent that (I don't understand why some shared libs for 32 bit programs should be conflicting with kde) and turn my system multiarch the save way? Thanks for any help in advance!

I searched for this keyword, but I didn't get this search result. There seems to be no such package, only ia32-libs but no ia32-libs-multiarch. Even when I specifically search for the latter I only get the former as single result.

I was going to install GoogleEarth. Apparently they don't make a 64 bit Linux version. I read about the ia32-libs and multiarch etc. Seemed a bit of a pain so I said, nevermind. That's the only URL I saved.

Thanks for the link, but this doesn't help. My problem seems to some kind of dependency hell. BTW, i can install skype and the 32bit libs that come with it without having anything uninstalled. So there must be something in the ia32-libs package that causes this. How can I find out what it is and work around it?

Okay, I'm a moron, sorry! That indeed was the problem. After I did the updates, I can install it and nothing has to be removed. It's installing in the background now and I really hope my system will still work when I reboot. I just wonder why apt couldn't tell me that some packages have to be updated and came up with this stupid solution of removing kde instead. Normally, it does tell me about necessary updates and just adds these to its list when I try to install something new that requires some packages to be updated.

Coming from Debian, I am very careful about general updates and I usually don't don't them if the system works. Almost every time I completely updated Debian there was something broken afterwards and needed a lot of time to fix. I forgot it's probably saver on Ubuntu/Mint. Well, I'll see in a few minutes…